Shells shelter the organisms that build them. As external skeletons (exoskeletons), they serve as homes, supporting and protecting the bodies inside them and, in fact, forming part of them. In English, the inner parts of snail shells are called chambers, from the Latin camerae; contemporary Chinese refers to them as “rooms” (shi) and labels the horizontal compartments ceng, a term that is used to denote layers of various kinds, most commonly the floors of a building. Furthermore, contemporary Chinese uses le, which translates as “ribs,” to denote the vertical parts of the shell structure, marking them as bone-like. The creative agency of molluscs as architects of their own homes is not unparalleled in nature. Birds, for example, design and construct temporary shelters in the form of nests. What makes some molluscs unique, however, is their ability to produce pearls through a process of biomineralization around a nucleus formed of a parasite, a grain of sand or any other particle that enters the shell.

Early modern scholars and artisans in Europe and China recognized the exceptional agency of organisms housed in shells to create matter and fashion it in aesthetically appealing ways. As this chapter shows, in both cultures shell-building organisms were even considered human-like in their abilities to design and construct proto-architectural geometric shapes. Striking images of birds hatching from shells feature in Chinese and European sources from the early modern period, evoking associations between the materiality of shells and eggshells and between molluscs and birds that both craft their own shelters.